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Television

03/25/2012

With the Final Four now set, it appears that I will finish my worst bracket in years, thanks to my awful basketball predicting ability. It is in a situation like this that I could have utilized BI to help me out with my bracket. The sites I have linked to use some sort of scientific method to determine outcomes for the NCAA tournament.

The first is from 2011, but uses a man-made formula to determine the outcome of the tournament. As you could see from his predictions, the writer did not have the greatest bracket, but he did manage to call some great upsets (Arizona over Duke being one of them) and had a much better bracket than I did. And I have won a lot of brackets in my day. Business Intelligence can help with this very kind of bracket - and can at least keep your bracket from finishing dead last like I did this year.

The next is a creation by a statistician who used a similar model to the above formula. The one big difference is that this model uses expert picks in his formula so that popular upset picks are weighted slightly more than they would if they were purely numerical. If you follow the link to the author's predictions, you will see that there are not actual picks, but rather percentages of victories. With the final four being the only games remaining, those games will be the only ones with percentages still on the page. Hopefully, after the tournament is over, all 67 game percentages will be listed on the site. I, for one, am interested to see what percentage Lehigh had to beat Duke in the round of 64.

Despite having two different methods of scientifically determining a champion in March Madness, obviously there is no way for ANYBODY to completely predict a perfect bracket. In fact, this season all brackets were busted (not perfect) by the second day of round 1. According to ESPN, nobody in the nation had the entire first round correct - and that statement was released halfway through the first round. For an entity such as the NCAA basketball tournament, it is incredibly difficult for anybody - man or machine - to correctly predict an entire tournament's outcome. But we can still use business intelligence to look somewhat smarter than a person who arbitrarely picks a champion because of a cool nickname or fun colors (South Dakota State Jackrabbits?)